as 1798, Inspectors realized the institution was deeply in debt from the “extensive credit” that was extended toward the prison manufactories.185 After years of struggling to make the manufactories profitable, Inspectors decided the prison would stop purchasing raw materials for the prisoners to craft into goods for sale. They closed down the store where goods produced in the prison had been sold for years. Inspectors reported that it was better to have convicts work “for individuals who furnish the materials,” saving them the trouble of purchasing supplies and assuming debt.186 The prison thus resorted to contracting out the prisoners’ labor to the highest bidder.187 As a result, the convicts worked for “customers” who paid a set price to the keeper for labor while providing the convicts with the necessary materials.188
These failing manufactories quickly inspired vocal criticism from those who felt that the primary purpose of the penitentiary—moral reform—was being subjugated to profit. In 1812, Judge Jacob Rush, brother of Dr. Benjamin Rush, claimed that the practice of making “money out of the bodies of convicts” could actually “destroy their souls.”189 Judge Rush condemned the way that labor came to dominate the institution at the expense of other concerns, calling the law a “public fraud” that claimed to reform criminals while instead nurturing them in a “school for vice.” Roberts Vaux later echoed the argument that attention to profit over punishment led to doom. Vaux scoffed, “The grand object was not so much the punishment and reform of the criminals, as a pecuniary balance, at the year’s end” as if financial concerns were beneath moral ones.190 In 1821, even the Inspectors themselves admitted the failure of their prison manufactory because it both lost money and failed to reform inmates.191 The failure of manufacturing was one thing, but the failure of punishment was not an option. During these hard times, reformers and Inspectors looked to the women’s side of the prison for inspiration.
Women served as a crucial site of optimism and hope for Inspectors, reformers, and jailers during a challenging, unstable period for two reasons: they seemed to work more dutifully than the men, and they more easily adopted a submissive disposition. Even when women rebelled against orders, men in charge did not take these challenges to their authority seriously. Rather, when women did not work to their full potential or challenged their authority, keepers responded to them very differently than they did to the men. Reform was nothing if not gendered, and it demanded different things of men and women in prison. For instance, on occasions that women were not working to their potential, reformers generally made excuses for them. In their January 1799 report, Inspectors noted “many idle” women convicts and described women vagrants and prisoners for trial as “many idle some dirty and some ragged.”192 They did not blame the women for their behavior, however, noting instead that they were “unable to procure a sufficient number of spinning wheels to employ all the women,” particularly since many of the wheels were destroyed in a fire started by the men. When women did not work efficiently or dutifully, the Inspectors generally had an excuse for it.
Women who resisted the orders were easily handled by skilled guards who knew how to manipulate and cultivate submission from them. One woman, “an old offender” who tried to burn the prison down in the early 1790s, was described as “ungovernable” and “of an extreme bad character.” But she was no match for a keeper who knew how to handle her emotions and cultivate her submission. Inspector Caleb Lownes recalled that once she realized the keeper “was easy” and did not provoke her “to keep up her passions” she was left with no reason to resent him and thereby “at length submitted.”193 Submission was the necessary state for this particular woman—or any woman—to achieve. This woman not only obeyed all the rules of the house after this incident, but promised that she would “perform two days work, each day” for the duration of her stay. Hard work and appropriate submissiveness were expected from women in prison.
There are several explanations for such dramatically different responses to men and women’s idleness. Women were viewed as easily reformable because they worked hard and demonstrated the expected deference to male authority figures most of the time.194 By demanding deference and submission of the female convicts—two traits central to women’s proper role in society—reformers ensured women would have a greater likelihood of reformation than the men. Inspectors had less to prove in overseeing the women. Female prisoners were trained to assume their proper roles in the heterosexual political economy: as domestic caretakers, economic dependents, and subordinate followers of men. Inspectors did not aspire to make independent, self-sustaining productive citizens of women in prison. There was no path to citizenship for women inside the prison—and few options for them once outside it.
Enslaved and bound women of African descent who challenged the authority of white men and women who claimed possession of them were also no match for the disciplinary regime of the prison. While many references to women in prison avoid mention of race or ethnicity, one visitor made special note of how easily black women received and submitted to the authority of the white keepers. Robert Turnbull, a young lawyer visiting from South Carolina, toured the prison and wrote extensively of his experience. His essay was widely read both domestically and in Europe and powerfully demonstrates the insidious correlation between enslavement and imprisonment in dictating the power relationship between white men and black women.195 Representations of black women having positive experiences in prison advanced liberal ideals of individual advancement in the face of massive structural obstacles. When visiting the women’s ward, Turnbull was most fascinated by “a young negress” who requested a discharge, though having served less than half her two-year sentence. He reported that her conduct “had been regularly pleasing” and her work ethic admirable. Although her request was rejected, Turnbull was impressed with how she received the bad news, writing, “She declared herself satisfied with his reasoning, and resumed her employment at the spinning-wheel with cheerfulness and activity.”196 Thus black women prisoners served a critical political and discursive function as emblems of model inmates. Turnbull characterized imprisonment as a positive force in the lives of black women that strengthened the ideological legitimacy of institutional punishment.197 Black women in particular were used to advance the idea that punishment promised to be a positive force in their lives, just as racist justifications of slavery portrayed the enslaved as happy and taking pleasure in their work in service to their master. Each time a reformer highlighted the successful reform of a black woman in prison, he or she justified the expansion of incarceration.
Accounts of female prisoners—African American, European immigrants, and a few Anglo- and Irish Americans—embracing their captors were vital in reassuring reformers and Inspectors of their own benevolence. Turnbull described a vivid scene of heartfelt reunion between women prisoners and a keeper who had been away. He wrote, “With the most heartfelt expressions of joy, they hastened from their seats to welcome him on his return, and on his part, he received them with a mixed sense of tenderness and satisfaction.”198 This was celebrated as evidence that characteristics of sentimentality were adopted in the prison itself, enabling the keeper to serve as “a protector—an instructor—not an ironhearted overseer!” This language of benevolent paternalism aimed to obscure the violence of punishment and distinguish it from slavery. These expansive feelings shared by inmates and keepers characterized a soft, warm, and comfortable paternalism expected of the family, not the state. Women prisoners were to be reformed through their relationships within the prison family, which further bolstered the heterosexual political economy.
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Women’s labor was deemed a great success because women dutifully complied with their work orders, thereby demonstrating both the viability and the effectiveness of institutional punishment. This seemed to be the right remedy for those rebellious runaways and others who refused to work and resisted the authority of those who claimed a right to their labor. Forced labor under the watchful eye of a jailer was hardly a change from the conditions under which many women regularly labored, in either slavery or freedom. Men who proved resistant to authority under the wheelbarrow law continued to undermine efforts of the state to discipline them into a productive labor force.
The
